Wednesday, July 2, 2014

The Conceptual Sympathy of Ernst Cassirer

Novelist are sometimes lauded for their ability to make a
wide range of characters—even the most despicable—understandable and even
compelling, if not likable. Call it intuitive sympathy.

We less often meet up with the notion of “conceptual
sympathy”—the ability to set the ideas of a given thinker in the clearest
light, exposing the nugget of insight that remains valid without dwelling
overmuch on the dross and confusion surrounding it. The German philosopher
Ernst Cassirer possessed this ability to an unusual degree.

Let me give you an example from his late work, An Essay on Man (1944). Summing up the
position of the Stoics, he writes:

He who lives in
harmony with his own self, his demon,
lives in harmony with the universe; for both the universal order and the
personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a
common underlying principle. Man proved his inherent power of criticism, of
judgment and discernment, by conceiving that in this correlation the Self, not
the universe, has the leading part…”

And a few sentences further on he concludes:

This spirit [of Greek
philosophy] was a spirit of judgment, of critical discernment between Being and
Non-Being, between truth and illusion, between good and evil. Life in itself is
changing and fluctuating, but the true value of life is to be sought in an
eternal order that admits of no change. It is not in the world of our sense, it
is only in the power of our judgment that we can grasp this order. Judgment is
the central power of man, the common source of truth and morality. For it is
the only thing in which man depends entirely on himself; it is free,
autonomous, self-sufficing.

Cassirer is
summarizing the position of Marcus Aurelius here. It’s not clear whether he
endorses it entirely, but he describes it eloquently. The association of
judgment (rather than verification) with truth and being is sound.

But there are some
problems here, too. In particular, the divorce of judgment and sense seems
unnecessary and even perverse. To what, after all, do we apply our judgment
except our experience, which is derived largely from our senses?

By the same token, is it really true that judgment is “the
only thing in which man depends entirely on himself”? Judgment might be
considered autonomous is so far as it leaves behind all arbitrary norms and
standards. But we apply our judgment to things we come upon, things that lie
beyond us. When we’re moved by a work of art, for example, and judge it to be
beautiful, the judgment may be ours alone, but the work of art remains a
foreign object. That we can respond to such experience at all might be offered
as an argument in favor of the Stoic position Cassirer has already described,
whereby “the universal order and the personal order are nothing but different …
manifestations of a common underlying principle.” But if this is true, then,
far from being autonomous, judgment is based on that principle, and reaffirms
our connections to things both within and beyond our selves—the murmuring
harmonies and discords of life.

According to Cassirer, this is the sort of judgment Jesus
executes, and within a paragraph or two of this sympathetic description of
Stoicism, Cassirer introduces Christianity as the major historical challenge to
the Stoic position. Did Christianity refute Stoicism? Not really, Cassirer
tells us. He notes that the two systems have a great deal in common. He breezes
past Jesus, however, whose maxims are perhaps too enigmatic and contradictory,
in his eagerness to introduce us to the more conceptually fleshed out notions
of St. Augustine.

And so it goes. In succeeding pages, Cassirer presents us
with similarly cogent references to Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal, whom he
clearly admires. As we meet and greet Bruno and Diderot, we may begin to feel
that in the course of a few pages, under Cassirer’s gentle guidance, we’re
finally getting a grip on the Western intellectual tradition.

Cassirer is impressed with Darwinian evolution, though he
observes astutely that its impact on philosophical speculation was rooted less
in the “facts” of evolution that in the theoretical interpretation of those
facts—an interpretation that had a definite metaphysical character. He points
out that Aristotle had an evolutionary theory, too. But in Aristotle’s view,
evolution was driven by “final causes.” That is to say, less advanced species
were developing toward the supreme species—man. For Darwin, on the other hand,
evolution was being driven by accidental causes. It has no pre-determined end
or final form.

“Modern thinkers,” Cassirer writes, “have…definitely succeeded
in accounting for organic life as a mere product of chance.”

But have they, really? In defense of this claim, Cassirer
quotes a passage in which Darwin describes an impressive edifice being built using
no material other than the random pieces of rubble he finds at the base of a
cliff. Darwin concludes:

Now, the fragments of
stone, though indispensible to the architect, bear to the edifice being built
by him the same relation which the fluctuating variations of organic beings
bear to the varied and admirable structures ultimately acquired by their
modified descendants.

The careful reader, pursuing the analogy to its logical conclusion,
might respond: “Then who is this
architect you are referring to? Who is this architect of individual creatures,
of Life?”

An architect who builds an edifice begins with a design, a
sense of scale and proportion, an aesthetic, and a utilitarian purpose. He
chooses his stones accordingly. If his choice of building material is limited
to what lies near at hand (and is therefore “accidental”) that will influence
the design of the finished product, but only to a degree. Such limitations
having been granted, the completed edifice will reflect the architect’s
intention.

This scenario doesn’t resemble the evolutionary path in the
slightest. When an organism receives a freak mutation, there is no architect
present, and neither intention nor choice are involved. Very few mutations are
environmentally beneficial. Most peter out within a generation.

Evolutionary development only becomes explicable when we
include, along with all the accidental causes, the intentionality of the
individual creature, who seizes and makes use of an accidental advantage,
imbuing it with value, as it were, and passing it on to its descendants. Both
the accident and the urge to thrive are necessary for development. Accident
alone produces nothing but chaos.

Cassirer notes that during the course of the nineteenth
century, philosophers enamored of Darwinianism found it imperative to explain
the diversity of human cultures by recourse to simple mechanisms: “Nietzsche
proclaims the will to power, Freud signalizes the sexual instinct, Marx enthrones
the economic instinct.”

By this point in time, in Cassirer’s view, “our modern
theory of man lost its intellectual center.” (P. 21) Man has made his way from
metaphysics to theology to mathematics to biology. Now a “complete anarchy of
thought” holds sway, a dreadful “antagonism of thought” in which every thinker
relies on “his own conception and evaluation of human life.”

Things sound pretty bad, and more than a few scholars have
written weighty books about the “crisis” of late nineteenth-century thought. And
yet, doesn’t it also sound strangely familiar? Ten pages earlier, Cassirer had
been praising a Stoic world view based on personal judgment, “The only thing in
which man depends entirely on himself.” Now he’s describing a very similar
situation, in which every thinker relies on “his own conception and evaluation
of human life.” But now he's describing it as a world of “complete anarchy.” What happened?

My point is not to challenge Cassirer’s judgment, though
I think he’s missed the mark, here, perhaps under the influence of the chaotic
and colossally destructive historical situation under which he was writing.
What I’m impressed with is Cassirer’s knack for calmly highlighting the
essential virtue and drama of any given period, the critical thrust of any
thinker’s work.

In an earlier work, The
Platonic Renaissance in England (1932), Cassirer makes an attempt to expose
the historical significance of now-obscure English writers such as Whichcote,
Henry More, and Cudworth. He paints a warts-and-all portrait of thinkers who
wrote badly and at great length, but who nevertheless sustained important
streams of thought that were in danger
of being submerged in the shallower but broader flow of British empiricism.

Especially interesting, at least to my mind, is the thirty-page
digression he makes to explain how much more difficult to the Augustinian world
view was the challenge presented by Plato, than that which Aristotle had
offered at an earlier date.

He suggests that Aristotleanism, as it appears in the philosophy
of Thomas Aquinas, does little to bridge the gap between knowledge and faith,
reason and revelation, nature and grace. It was Aquinas's towering intellect that held things together.During the Renaissance the school of Padua, through “laborious
philological and systematic analysis,” succeeded in showing how incompatible Aristotelian and Christian positions are.

During the Reformation the entire superstructure of
scholasticism was set aside in an effort to return to the Christianity of
Augustine and Paul. Cassirer writes: “It seemed finally as if Augustinian
doctrine had triumphed over its great philosophical rival—indeed, as if it had
emerged more formidable still from its controversy with scholastic
Aristotelianism.”

But once Renaissance thinkers gained greater access to
Plato’s work through translations, Augustinianism was essentially doomed.
Plato’s theory of Eros as a bridge between the real and the ideal, and his
association of Eros with “the Good,” (bolstered at a later date by Plotinus’s
notion of the beautiful) had no use for Augustine’s higher power.

The Idea of the good is thus set forth not only as the end
and aim of knowledge … but also as the strongest bond comprehending all being,
earth and heaven, the sensible and the intelligible world. To question the Idea
of the good, or to limit it by an ostensibly higher norm, would mean for Plato
the dissolution of being itself and the sacrifice of all human as well as all
divine order for chaos. Plato’s theology is thus based on self-reliance and on
the self-sufficiency of the moral life. In so far as this self-sufficiency has
its foundation in the will, there can be no absolute depravity of the will for
Plato. The power of Eros constantly works against the doctrine of original evil
and triumphs over it.

Bravo! After a lengthy discussion of Ficino and the Florentine
Academy, Cassirer moves on to the influence asserted by Neoplatonic doctrines
on the poetry of the English Renaissance. He has taken the time to set the
stage for the appearance of the Cambridge Platonists, and in so doing, he offers
us a brief and illuminating mini-history of Western thought.

It’s almost enough to make you hunt up that old paperback
copy of The Fairie Queene!

About Me

The Macaroni blog is dedicated to the subjects that have enlivened the print edition of Macaroni for more than twenty-five years - travel, films, food, ideas, music ... you name it. My name is John Toren. I write the blog. If you're interested in lengthier forays into the same fields track down a copy of my new book,All the Things You Are or my previous book By the Way. For a closer look at the state of Minnesota, check out my travel book, The Seven States of Minnesota.